Monday, 15 May 2017. Today KDE has made a testing release of our desktop Plasma 5.10 with new features across the suite to give users an experience which lives up to our tagline: simple by default, powerful when needed.

Panel Task Manager

Middle Mouse Click to Group

Task Manager, the list of applications in the panel, has gained options for middle mouse click such as grouping and ungrouping applications.

The icon size in vertical Task Managers is now configurable to support more common vertical panel usage patterns

Improved app identification and pinning in Task Manager for apps that rely on StartupWMClass, perl-SDL-based apps and more

Folder View Is the New Default Desktop

Folder on the Desktop by Default

After some years shunning icons on the desktop we have accepted the inevitable and changed to Folder View as the default desktop which brings some icons by default and allows users to put whatever files or folders they want easy access to. Many other improvements have been made to the Folder View include:

Spring Loading in Folder View making drag and drop of files powerful and quick

More space-saving/tighter icon grid in Folder View based on much user feedback

File copying notifications have a context menu on previews giving access to actions such as open containing folder, copy, open with etc

Improved plasma-windowed (enforces applet default/minimum sizes etc)

'desktop edit mode', when opening toolbox reveals applet handles

Performance optimizations in Pager and Task Manager

'Often used' docs and apps in app launchers in addition to 'Recently used'

Panel icons (buttons for popup applets, launcher applets) now follow the Icons -> Advanced -> Panel size setting in System Settings again, so they won't take up too much space, particularly useful for wide vertical panels

Revamped password dialogs for network authentication

The security of the lock screen architecture got reworked and simplified to ensure that your system is secured when the screen is locked. On Linux systems the lock screen is put into a sandbox through the seccomp technology.

Plasma's window manager support for hung processes got improved. When a window is not responding any more it gets darkened to indicate that one cannot interact with it any more.

Support for locking and unlocking the shell from the startup script, useful especially for distributions and enterprise setups

Audio Volume applet has a handy menu on each device which you can use to set is as default or switch output to headphones.

Improved touch screen support

Virtual keyboard on Log In and Lock Screen

Touch Screen Support has improved in several ways:

Virtual Keyboard in lock screen

Virtual Keyboard in the login screen

Touch screen edge swipe gestures

Left screen edge defaults to window switching

Show auto-hiding panels through edge swipe gesture

Working for the Future with Wayland

We have put a lot of work into porting to new graphics layer Wayland, the switch is coming but we won't recommend it until it is completely transparent to the user. There will be improved features too such as KWin now supports scaling displays by different levels if you have a HiDPI monitor and a normal DPI screen.

Keyboard layout support in Wayland now has all the features of X11:

Layout switcher in the system tray

Per layout global shortcut

Switch layout based on a policy, either global, virtual desktop, application or per window

IPC interface added, so that other applications can change layout.

Plymouth Boot Splash Selection

Plymouth KControl Module

A new System Settings module lets you download and select boot time splashes.

Bundle Packages

Experimentla support for forthcoming new bundle package formats has been implemented. Discover software centre has gained provisional backends for Flatpak and Snappy. New plugin xdg-desktop-portal-kde has added KDE integration into Flatpak packaged applications.

Support for GNOME’s Open Desktop Ratings, replacing old Ubuntu popularity contest with tons of already existing reviews and comments.